58
THE NEW YORKER, FEBRUARY 4, 2013
WHAT DID I LOVE
What did I love about killing the chickens? Let me start
with the drive to the farm as darkness
was sinking back into the earth.
The road damp and shining like the snail s silver
ribbon and the orchard
with its bony branches. I loved the yellow rubber
aprons and the way Janet knotted my broken strap.
And the stainless-steel altars
we bleached, Brian sharpening
the knives, testing the edge on his thumbnail. All eighty-eight Cornish
hens huddled in their crates. Wrapping my palms around
their white wings, lowering them into the tapered urn.
Some seemed unwitting as the world narrowed;
some cackled and fluttered; some struggled.
I gathered each one, tucked her bright feet,
drew her head through the kill cone s sharp collar,
her keratin beak and the rumpled red vascular comb
that once kept her cool as she pecked in her mansion of grass.
I didn t look into those stone eyes. I didn t ask forgiveness.
I slid the blade between the feathers
and made quick crescent cuts, severing
the arteries just under the jaw. Blood like liquor
pouring out of the bottle. When I see the nub of heart later,
it s hard to believe such a small star could flare
like that. I lifted each body, bathing it in heated water
until the scaly membrane of the shanks
sloughed off under my thumb.
And after they were tossed in the large plucking drum
I loved the newly naked birds. Sundering
the heads and feet neatly at the joints, a poor
man s riches for golden stock. Slitting a fissure
reaching into the chamber,
told me. "It s just generally the way the
cars are driven that s entertaining---you
know, good for the public. Cause all of
the drivers---well, most of them---drive
on the limit, and it s a case of the engi-
neers making the limit more difficult to
reach." Circuit safety standards have
evolved considerably since the death of
Senna, with larger run-off areas and
more forgiving barriers, but if cars were
to become much faster, many of the
venerated old tracks that lend the sport
its lore would need to be reconfigured,
at a cost of millions.
Because of its direct ties to industry,
Formula One is more susceptible to
economic forces than most sports; after
the financial crisis of 2008, BMW,
Toyota, and Honda shuttered their rac-
ing operations, and the F.I.A. over-
hauled the regulations more substan-
tially than at any point in the previous
twenty-five years, with an eye toward
keeping budgets under control. Broad
rule changes appeal to Newey, because
they present an opportunity to recon-
ceive the car more or less from scratch.
He ll mock up a working layout at half
scale on his drafting table, while poring
over the rulebook. The 2009 austerity
regime inspired his rerouting of the ex-
haust system, an innovation so beneficial
that the team affixed decoy stickers re-
sembling pipes to the sides of its cars to
distract spying competitors. Now, after
three years of creeping restrictions
against everything that had seemed to
improve the cars performance, Newey
was finding the conditions less wel-
come. Tens of millions of dollars were
being spent in the pursuit of each last
tenth of a second. "Eventually, every-
body will converge on the same solu-
tion," he said. "Effectively, all the cars
end up the same, at which point the
only differentiator is the engine and the
driver." Ecclestone once famously lik-
ened the sport s drivers to light bulbs, in
the sense that they were interchange-
able. In an overly restrictive environ-
ment, Newey feared the same would be
said of designers.
Newey is not optimistic about the
next regulatory overhaul, planned for
2014, which takes aim at the sport s car-
bon footprint. It promises less powerful
engines, larger batteries, and a greater
emphasis on energy renewal---in effect,
hybrid racecars. "It s a political idea,"
Newey said, with an engineer s disdain.
Working for Red Bull---a company
that s in the business of "selling cans, not
cars," as the driver Sebastian Vettel put
it---has afforded Newey the luxury of
indifference to the sport s relevance to
the non-sporting world, a point of pride
for others. Newey went on, "There s al-
ways been this notion that Formula
One should be used to develop the
breed---the breed being the road car---
and I think if you go back into, let s say,
the sixties, then there are successful ex-
amples of that. Disc brakes, fuel injec-
tion, lightweight construction---all first
appeared in Formula One. But the true
spinoff from Formula One into road
cars now, in all reality, is somewhere be-
tween very small and zero, in terms of
technology that s developed in Formula
One being of real benefit to the road
cars, as opposed to a salesman s dream."
Any claims to the contrary by the man-
ufacturers, he said, are "pure pretense."
There was talk of President Obama
passing through Texas on the
weekend of the Austin Grand Prix, and
this led some Formula One insiders to
wonder if he might make an appearance
at the race. "Is Mr. President a big fan
of the old motorsport?" Will Buxton,
the SPEED (and now NBC) broad-
caster, asked, while killing time in Red
Bull s makeshift hospitality suite, on
the paddock. "He seems like a cool guy.
That would be the best thing to make
people aware that this is happening."
Obama did not turn up, though the
idea was perhaps not as far-fetched as it
sounds. During the next several days of
walking the paddock, I spied Mexico s